sieve2 hours ago
I am using the Xteink X4 as my primary e-reader now-a-days. Simple ESP32 microcontroller. Plastic+glass shell with an e-ink screen. MicroSD card works like a cache. Battery lasts for weeks. Works great.
Don't get me wrong. I like modern CPUs with huge caches and incredible power, but you do not need this for most devices. Also leads to lazy programming practices and calculators consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM.
boznzan hour ago
I'm currently building a RP2350 board with the HDMI/USB and I2S Audio I have also added the 16MB SRAM and higher vCore for overclocking which the RP2350 supports for a similar personal project to this. My first PCB had a few newbie mistakes which due to my lousy hand/eye coordination I wasnt able to fix so I am spinning up a V2 to go to JLPCB in the next week or two (https://rodyne.com/?p=3999). Your post resonated with a lot of why I am doing it so keep up the good work.
joshuaissac2 hours ago
Caveat: 60p RP2350 microcontroller on a board that sells for $40 and has 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the 520K that the RP2350 comes with). But that is only needed for Photoshop. The 520K is more than enough to emulate the Mac 128K.
kbrannigan16 minutes ago
This is wonderful and amazing. Computing can be very simple. I think constraints and hardware restrictions can unlock creativity.
Imagine running an GPT-3 Generation model on a raspberry pi . This would be great
tomcaman hour ago
I am thrilled by this. While the world is understandably complaining about the price of RAM and CPU I keep thinking about the demo scene or people like this. In the worst case scenario, we could retool our lives to some extent using optimized version of older tech.
retrac2 hours ago
I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers.
I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though.
duskwuff2 hours ago
> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.
With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
benj1112 hours ago
Window 95 ran on 8mb of ram.
The first Amigas had 512k of ram. Both had much less processing power.
With 32mb you could probably run some kind of Linux.
Clamchop7 minutes ago
Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.
abananaan hour ago
Well, the first Amigas had only 256KB of RAM. Doubling that to 512KB (via a memory expansion card) was a luxury!
mikepurvis2 hours ago
uCLinux was a real thing for a good long while, though I think at this point real microprocessors are cheap, simple, and widely available enough that there hasn't been much need.
ant6n2 hours ago
Which “old days” would those be. Sounds like it would be 50 years ago
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benj1112 hours ago
64k was acceptable 40 years ago.
a1o3 hours ago
For a more capable but still underpowered computer, I found Antix can run well in almost 20year old hardware - I use it in an EEEPC 4G Surf, but I modded it to have more storage recently.
vardump2 hours ago
"easily adds 4Mb RAM". A bit misleading way to say 512 kB RAM.
animanoir4 hours ago
[dead]
hyperhello2 hours ago
Black and white photoshop, yes.